Questionnaire Survey to Qualify the Acoustics of Spanish Concert Halls

This paper describes the design, refinement process and statistical validation of a questionnaire of subjective response addressed to audiences and to music experts in order to research the acoustics of Spanish concert halls. Twenty-one concert halls in various regions of Spain were sampled subjectively during the performance of 27 concerts. The questionnaire, sufficiently tested and refined in piloted halls, was designed with 63 items, in which each question was answered with a score from 0 to 5 points, and was completed by 1574 people: 430 music experts, 68 acoustic experts and 1076 members of the general public during scheduled concerts. The questionnaire shows high reliability, more than 0.930, and an appropriate grouping of questions. Through factor analysis, nine factors were obtained whereby the factor "the pleasantness of the overall sound of the room" explained 26% of the variance. The rate of no response to the items of the sections was analysed, and the same statistical pattern was found for the various groups of respondents. Due to the parallelism in the qualifications by the public and the experts, the subjective assessment of the halls can be restricted to music experts. Finally, an analysis of the subjective global assessment of the concert halls given by the listeners and by the values of the factors obtained is carried out.